The Importance of Committing to SEO

By JoeDecember 17, 2009

The success of an SEO firm largely rests on the achievements of its clients. In fact, the main focus of any internet marketing firm is to make their clients more successful. Yet, the main factor that will determine if a website sinks or swims in the search engines is the business owner’s willingness and ability to commit to an on-going holistic SEO approach.

What commitment does not mean: Now, committing to SEO doesn’t mean the client needs to be involved in every infinitesimal detail of the procedure. It more importantly does not mean that you engage in an SEO project and then stop, thinking that you have somehow shown an impressive commitment to search engine best practices and will thereby soar beyond your competition forever.

What it does mean: It means that SEO is an ongoing process that is contingent on continuing to improve your site, making it a better experience for the users and the search engines. It is overtly noticeable that over time, business owners that employ the full spectrum of “SEO basics” on an on-going basis typically reap much more success. Those basics include copywriting to improve unique content factors, on-page optimization to commit to their more lucrative keywords and building popularity from outside sites to improve keyword-focused in-bound spiderability.

Example for clarity: For example, let’s say Business Owner A came to the ECI team for what we call an SEO foundation project which consists of optimizing 25 of their website’s most important pages. We identify the best keywords to optimize for each page using our own appropriate measurements and proprietary algorithms. We then rework the title tags and make sure the Meta data and body copy are all in line. Essentially this would be a one-time project to introduce a commitment between these pages and the newly chose terms for the search engines to appreciate. Business Owner A then falls out of contact shortly after the foundation project is complete. Now, let’s say Business Owner B is in the same industry as business Owner A, has the same vendors, and sells the same products as Business Owner A. They have also undergone a foundation project with ECI. However, for arguments sake, let’s say that Business Owner B is committed to SEO. They have been contacting blog owners to acquire inbound links; they have signed on with ECI for copywriting to help them increase their unique content, and eventually are successful in creating unique product descriptions for all their product pages as well as unique copy for their category pages. This disparity of efforts relay very different messages to Google and are calculated by Google’s algorithm as having vastly differing commitment levels. Business A may see a bump in rankings for covering some of the most basic elements in SEO, but Business B is playing right into the most heavily weighed factors in Google algorithm and will not only see constant improvement, but will sustain them as well.

Lesson: Only a commitment to continued SEO efforts can result in progressive SERP improvements – period.

A commitment to adopting a holistic SEO strategy is a characteristic of all our clients that are leaders in their respective niches. It’s always fun to see the dramatic trend-lines of revenue associated with SEO superstar sites. Below you will see a chart summarizing the organic search engine traffic for the past 3 years of 5 of Exclusive Concepts’ committed SEO clients. These clients have all undergone an ECI foundation project as well as work monthly with us on various other elements of Search Engine Marketing. It should be no surprise that year over year these businesses have surpassed their previous year’s traffic.

(Due to confidentiality agreements, I have labeled the websites by the industry they are in instead of their actual web address.)